Geek Heresy (6 page)

Utopians believe that technology is inherently a positive force, that technology shapes civilization, and that more of it is a good thing. And they have what seems like irrefutable evidence. Thanks to advances such
as modern medicine, air conditioning, cheap transport, and real-time communication, middle-class people today enjoy a quality of life that kings and queens didn’t have a century ago. There’s a reason, utopians argue, why historical epochs are named after technologies – the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age – and why human culture flourished after the invention of the printing press.

But whatever they say and write, what most unites utopians is how they feel about technology. They love it, and they want more. Many believe that
every
kind of problem can be solved by some invention, often one that is right around the corner. Whether the issue is poverty, bad governance, or climate change, they say things like, “[There] is no limit to human ingenuity,” and “When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce.”
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Besotted with gadgets, technological utopians scoff at social institutions like governments, civil society, and traditional firms, which they pity as slow, costly, behind the times, or all of the above.

I sympathize with the utopians because I was one myself. When I started the computer class in Nakkalbande, it was in the hopes that exposure to the technology would improve lives. And my research looked for ways to use technology to alleviate poverty.

A Curmudgeonly Skepticism

But time after time, I realized that technology alone never did the trick. Whether it was MultiPoint in India or laptops in America, inventing and spreading new devices didn’t necessarily cause social progress.

Technology skeptics would harrumph and point out that aspects of the
Star Trek
future are already with us. Thanks to agricultural technologies, America produces more than enough food to feed everyone in the country, and the food is cheap. Yet, almost 5 million children in the United States suffer from food insecurity in any given year.
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Indeed, there is enough food to feed the whole world, but hunger persists. About one in eight people is malnourished; that’s 840 million people eating less than they need.
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Evidently, technological plenty doesn’t mean plenty for everyone.

Skeptics believe that technology is overhyped and often destructive. Nicholas Carr, author of
The Shallows
, suggests that the fast-twitch, hyperlinked Internet not only erodes our ability to think deeply, but also traps us like a Siren: “We may be wary of what our devices are doing to us, but we’re using them more than ever.” His book is ominously subtitled
What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
. In
The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
, Evgeny Morozov catalogs the myriad ways in which the Internet boosts, rather than contains, the power of repressive regimes: in China, social media is a tool for disseminating Communist Party propaganda; in Azerbaijan, webcams installed at election stations frightened citizens into voting for state-sponsored incumbents;
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in Iran, the chief of national police acknowledged a chilling fact of their anti-protest efforts: “The new technologies allow us to identify conspirators.”
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Technology skeptics like to point out unintended consequences. Jacques Ellul, for example, warned of the dangers of information overload back in 1965. “It is a fact that excessive data do not enlighten the reader or the listener,” he wrote. “They drown him.”
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Neil Postman suggested that broadcast media have created a culture that is “amusing itself to death,”
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like mythological lotus-eaters, or the soma-sedated characters of Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
. And Harvard professor Sheila Jasanoff has voiced the concerns of many in calling out climate change as a by-product of fossil-fuel-driven technologies.
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Incidentally, digital technologies play a shockingly large part in carbon emissions. One study estimated that in 2007, electronics accounted for 3 percent of carbon emissions globally and 7.2 percent of all electricity usage.
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In the United States in 2013, the data centers that store and distribute online content accounted, on their own, for about 2 percent of total electricity use.
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All of these figures are projected to grow.
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If skeptics are pessimistic, though, many of them share the utopians’ belief that technologies embody moral and political values. But where utopians see the promise of greater freedom and prosperity, skeptics see weakness, folly, and corruption. The economic efficiency of factories and assembly lines leads to a dehumanized society. High-tech entertainment prompts us to judge everything by its marketability. Social media turns us into zombies of “continual partial attention.”
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As for practical action, skeptics are less united than their utopian counterparts. They span a spectrum from neo-Luddites who would destroy technology to those who can’t quite give up their smartphones. At one extreme is author and activist Derrick Jensen, who wrote, “Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam.”
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Carr invoked a poet’s call for resistance, hoping that “we won’t go gently into the future our computer engineers and software programmers are scripting for us.”
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And some just throw up their hands. Ellul could see no easy solution: “It is not a matter of getting rid of it, but, by an act of freedom, of transcending it. How is this to be done? I do not yet know.”
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Not Good, Not Bad, Not Neutral

Utopians and skeptics have catchy rhetoric, but most reasonable people can see that the truth is neither
Star Trek
nor
Brave New World
. It’s probably a mixture of both. Melvin Kranzberg, a historian of technology, embraced technology’s apparent contradictions. “Technology,” he wrote in 1986, “is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”
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This enigmatic statement captures what is probably the most common view among scholars of technology today: Its outcomes are context-dependent. Technology has both positive and negative impacts because technology and people interact in complex ways.

But contextualist explanations are also unedifying. To stop at context dependency is to say very little altogether. The lessons tend to follow the lines of “more research is needed”; “it’s case by case”; or “it’s nuanced” – ivory-tower code for “it’s so complicated, there couldn’t possibly be any worthwhile generalizations.” As a proponent of one contextualist theory claimed, “explanation does not follow from description.”
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The Human Factor

Utopians, skeptics, and contextualists are each right in limited ways. The fifty-odd technology projects I oversaw in India produced a range of outcomes. A few improved people’s lives. The utopians would have
cheered. A few wasted time and resources. The skeptics would have said, “I told you so.” The majority fell into a middle ground where they succeeded as research projects, but benefits beyond that were limited. The contextualists would have nodded in sympathy.

But was there some other way to interpret these outcomes? As I looked for some structure to our findings, three factors emerged as necessary for real impact.

The first is the dedication of the researcher, not to research outcomes but to concrete social impact. Of all the projects I oversaw, the one that continues to affect the most lives is called Digital Green. It uses how-to videos featuring local farmers as a teaching aid to help instruct other farmers about better agriculture. Today the Indian Ministry of Rural Development is taking Digital Green to 10,000 villages, and the Ethiopian government has begun experimenting with it as well. None of this would be happening without Rikin Gandhi, who led the project. Gandhi has many talents, but what stands out is his single-minded focus on supporting smallholder farmers. Instead of designing the electronic version of a Rube Goldberg machine – which is what feature-happy technologists tend to do – he stuck with simple, off-the-shelf devices. Then, after we established Digital Green’s effectiveness, he left his research job to start a nonprofit organization. Without Gandhi’s devotion to social impact, Digital Green wouldn’t be much more than a research paper.

The second factor is the commitment and capacity of the partner organization. In my research group, we looked for capable, well-intentioned partners who had rapport with the communities we wanted to work with. Sometimes, though, we’d misjudge an organization and find ourselves stymied by its dysfunctions. In one project, we partnered with a sugarcane cooperative in a rural district three hours away from Bombay. We upgraded its communication infrastructure by replacing a creaky network of old personal computers with low-cost mobile phones. The new system worked, and farmers loved it. Had the cooperative rolled it out to all of its villages, it would have saved them tens of thousands of dollars every year.
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Yet an internal rivalry kept us from expanding beyond the pilot. (And as researchers, we lacked the patience
and charm to iron out the discord.) The technology worked perfectly, but institutional politics hampered deployment. Good partners were important, even with good technology.

The third factor lies with intended beneficiaries. They must have the desire and the ability to take advantage of the technology provided. Sometimes they don’t. In India, we worked with poor people who lacked basic health care and hygiene, so we thought it would be useful to offer the right information at the right time. But would-be beneficiaries hesitated to follow even the simplest advice. Women wouldn’t take iron pills because of the bitter taste. Households wouldn’t boil water because of the extra effort. Fathers would lose infants to minor illnesses because they balked at hospital charges of as little as 50 rupees (about $1, potentially a day’s wages). In other words, they were like any of us who fail to exercise and eat well despite knowing that we should. It didn’t matter whether we delivered the information via text messages, automated voice calls, entertaining videos, or interactive apps. Technology by itself didn’t budge social and psychological inertia.

These factors suggest that the contextualists are right. Context definitely matters. All three factors, though, point to
human
context as what matters most. Or, to put it another way, the technology isn’t the deciding factor even in a technology project. Of course, good design trumps poor design, but beyond some level of functionality, technical design matters much less than the human elements.
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The right people can work around a bad technology, but the wrong people will mess up even a good one.

This is consistent with a fourth camp of technology-and-society scholarship sometimes called social determinism.
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Versions of it are known as “the social construction of technology” and the “instrumental view” of technology. These and related theories emphasize that technology is molded and wielded by people. People decide the form of technologies, the purposes of their use, and the outcomes they generate. Social determinism rests on the plain fact that it is people who act and make decisions – technologies do not.
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But if social determinism is commonsense, it’s not quite enough. It says little about how much change follows in the wake of invention. So while I felt close kinship with social determinists, something was still missing.

It’s All Geek to Me

If you’ve ever landed on a webpage in a language you can’t read, you have an idea of what it means to be illiterate in a digital world. You can see that there’s a whole universe bursting with possibility, but none of it makes sense. You might recognize a few photos here and there, but your curiosity is piqued only to bang into a wall of indecipherable gibberish.

That was the experience of those we worked with who couldn’t read. It was true of the mothers of the students I taught in Nakkalbande, some of whom would pop into an occasional class to see what their children were up to. So one agenda for our research was digital interfaces for nonliterate users. In 2005 I hired Indrani Medhi, a designer who threw herself into the research and emerged within a few years as the world’s expert on what we called “text-free user interfaces.”

Medhi conducted much of her research in Nakkalbande. She got along well with Menon and shared her combination of toughness and empathy. Medhi was quick to befriend her research subjects – mostly women from poor families who earned $20 to $40 a month doing informal household work. Through them, Medhi found that illiteracy didn’t always mean innumeracy, at least in those communities. Many of the women could read numbers, even if they sometimes confused “2” and “5.” With a colleague, Archana Prasad, she also found that respondents understood cartoon drawings best, finding them less confusing than either simplified icons or photographs.
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These and other discoveries fed directly into Medhi’s designs.

Medhi and I had frequent discussions about her work, and some themes came up repeatedly. One was that illiteracy wasn’t black and white – it was a spectrum. Some people couldn’t read at all, others knew the alphabet, and still others could sound out words but couldn’t read a
newspaper. Another point was that users differed considerably in their responses to the same interface. Some people zipped through Medhi’s text-free interfaces and even seemed to enjoy the process. Others were hesitant and slow and required encouragement to continue.